Tag Archives: Jewish Labor Bund

A June 2026 Plea to Germany: Please Honor the Memory of the Vilna Jewish Partisans & Preserve their Rapidly Disappearing Fort in the Forest

Posted on 4 June 2026 by Defending History

LAST JEWISH PARTISAN FORT IN EUROPE | HISTORY | BLAMING THE VICTIMS | GERMANY | CHRISTIAN-JEWISH RELATIONS | HUMAN RIGHTS

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OPINION

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Please ask your elected officials to contact the German embassy in your country:

Please rapidly mark, fence and protect the ground sacred to Holocaust survivors and their families that now abuts the forest training grounds of the new German Brigade arriving in the Lithuanian forests as part of NATO. The fort, where 100 Vilna Ghetto partisans found refuge and valiantly fought the Nazis, is disappearing by the day, used for late night partying by the barracks builders, and very soon, if not corrected, by thousands of German troops… 

For decades, partisans veteran Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky (1922–2024) took thousands of visitors from around the world to this major historic site in the Lithuanian forest. What a splendid opportunity this is for genuine Holocaust education of the young German troops heading eastward. Video of Fania at the fort in 2007.

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Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky showing us around the Jewish partisan fort, in her Vilna Yiddish, in 2007 (video). Her last request to future generations. DH’s section on the Jewish partisan fort.

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Posted in Christian-Jewish Issues, Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky (Fania Brancovskaja): 1922-2024, Germany, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Remnants of Europe's Last Jewish Anti-Nazi Partisan Fort | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on A June 2026 Plea to Germany: Please Honor the Memory of the Vilna Jewish Partisans & Preserve their Rapidly Disappearing Fort in the Forest

Far-Left and Far-Right Politics are Not Good for Yiddish

Posted on 21 August 2014 by Defending History

O P I N I O N

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Early this summer (for the second year in a row), several participants in the annual Helix trip to Eastern Europe contacted Defending History asking to meet with us during their stay here in Vilnius. We promptly replied to each, explaining that one of us would be delighted to speak to the group, even for a very short talk, and gratis, but that we did not feel comfortable with the idea of them meeting us “secretly,” in other words without the agreement of the group’s leadership and/or sponsors.

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Posted in "Jewish" Events as Cover?, Double Games, Identity Theft of Litvak Heritage, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory, United States, Yiddish Affairs | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Far-Left and Far-Right Politics are Not Good for Yiddish

Has the Forward Association abandoned Elementary Ethics?

Posted on 3 April 2011 by Defending History

O P I N I O N

by Dovid Katz

On February 25th, the Yiddish Forverts in New York published a defamatory ad-hominem attack on this journal’s editor.

The article was signed by ‘Jacob London (Oxford)’, the pseudonym of Sovetish Heymland veteran Gennady Estraikh who was secretary to the Soviet magazine’s editor Aaron Vergelis for many years. Now, a resident of New York, he is listed as the paper’s editor for its ‘European Bureau’. It is quite shocking for many readers that the paper’s editor-in-chief, Boris Sandler, himself a Sovetish Heymland veteran, allows for the paper’s abuse for fake-name, fake-place vicious attack on colleagues in the field of Yiddish Studies.

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Posted in Dovid Katz, Human Rights, News & Views, Opinion, Yiddish Affairs | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Has the Forward Association abandoned Elementary Ethics?